Cliques Are Not Just For Kids: Being Snubbed Hurts Women

January 27, 2005|By Marla Paul, Special to the Sentinel

It's noon, and Pat Moore, a secretary at a suburban school, sits alone at her desk eating a salad she brought from home. Often when she glances out the window after the lunch bell rings, she will see her co-workers heading toward the parking lot on their way to a fast-food restaurant.

Although she has worked with the same people for more than a decade, Moore isn't included in the outing. On some days, tears fill her eyes as she watches the group leave.

"People can work with you all day long and you interact with them, but come lunchtime, you hear the [office] doors close and people disappear, and you're not invited to go. . . . I think middle-aged women's cliques are crueler than teenagers,' " says Moore, 54. "I'm disgusted by it."

She doesn't understand why she's left out. She tells herself there are always "in" people and "out" people, and she is destined to be the latter, just as she was as a teenager growing up "on the wrong side of the tracks" in a small Ohio railroad town.

Female cliques -- and the power they wield to trample feelings -- are not just an unpleasant memory from junior high and high school. These groups of friends or associates that are aloof to outsiders thrive in the grown-up world too. In some ways, they're different from girls' cliques, which help girls work out the social issues of late childhood and early adolescence, experts say.

Still, adult women find themselves bumping into the glass bubbles of these exclusive circles in the office, in parent organizations at their kids' schools -- even in houses of worship.

"Cliques are a part of women's and girls' intense desire to connect in a close way," says Judith V. Jordan, a clinical psychologist at the Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies, part of the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

PAIN OF REJECTION

Women usually have more skills and understanding than adolescent girls to cope with being left out. Still, that chilly experience may wound them.

"Some women take this very much to heart and believe it says something about them personally," says Cheryl Dellasega, a professor in the humanities department in the College of Medicine at Penn State University. "It penetrates them and makes them feel something negative about themselves."

"We all have a great yearning to belong," says Jordan, a co-author of Women's Growth In Connection (The Guilford Press, 1991, $19.95). "So to be excluded creates enormous suffering."

That's no exaggeration. A 2003 study at the University of California at Los Angeles showed that social exclusion activates the same area of the brain that registers the distress of physical pain. When the subjects felt socially rejected while playing a ball-tossing game on the computer, blood flow increased to the region that relates to pain. Hurt feelings apparently do `hurt.

This response may have evolved because of the importance of social bonds to human survival, says Naomi Eisenberger, a doctoral student in social psychology who was lead researcher in the study. She speculates that women are more affected by social rejection, possibly because they are more sensitive to it. Or they might just be more honest about their feelings.

The belonging that women crave can have tremendous benefits. Pam Schur has belonged to a circle of four close friends for eight years.

"We work out together, we celebrate birthdays together, we car-pool together, we go to lunch," says Schur, 41, a freelance writer. "If we're going to do something, that's the group we're going to do it with. You know no matter what, you will be included. You can rely on that everyday contact."

SNUBS AND FLUBS

Schur has other close friends from college and high school, but she feels a special connection to these women, whose sixth-grade daughters are friends, as well.

Schur is aware that cliques have a negative connotation and prefers to call her friends "a close-knit group of girls." "We're not into being exclusionary or snobby about it," she says.

When she and her friends are together at their kids' soccer banquet, for example, they make an effort to get to know other moms.

But even when women try to be inclusive, others may perceive slights. Marjorie Wright, a former graphic designer for an educational publishing company, always invited women in the art department to join her group of three for lunch.

"One of us would stand up and say, `Hey, it's lunchtime. Anybody want to go?' " says Wright, 41. Because the others usually declined, she stopped asking. So she was flabbergasted when a woman snidely called Wright's lunch group "The Three Musketeers" and accused her of snubbing other art-department co-workers.

Wright also learned that the woman and four other co-workers had exchanged nasty e-mails about her and thought she and her cohorts were going out to gossip about them.

"We would go out and talk about our kids; the other group of ladies would go out and complain about us going out to lunch without them," she says.

But Gloria Hodul, 50, doesn't pine for friendships with her neighbors. "As a teenager it meant more to belong to a group, but as an adult I'm not interested in trying to be included," she wrote in an e-mail. One of the benefits of her age, she says, is that fitting in is no longer a priority. At soccer games, when many of the parents are clustered and chatting in the stands, Hodul seeks out the other "quiet mother" sitting alone and invites her to join her.

Pat Moore, the school secretary, copes by keeping the office clique in perspective.

"It's not life and death," she says. "I have to make me feel good about me. . . . It has to come from within. You can't say, Woe is me and why did this happen? Go forward."